


Cassandra Syndrome

by fennishjournal (Shimi)



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Canon Backstory, Character Study, Female Character of Color, Gen, Police, Privilege, Racism, Sally Donovan Appreciation, Sexism, Women Being Awesome
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-08-04
Updated: 2013-08-04
Packaged: 2017-12-22 10:26:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/912111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shimi/pseuds/fennishjournal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is a story about Sally Donovan and Sherlock Holmes. It's the story of why Sally Donovan, who is a conscientious and smart copper, behaves as she does around Sherlock Holmes (and no, the answer is not “because she is mean and hates him for no reason”.) </p><p>It is also a story about Sally and her belief in her own perception of reality. It is a story about manipulation, privilege, intuition and procedures. About trust and that interplay between the personal and the interpersonal that makes us human.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cassandra Syndrome

**Author's Note:**

> Acknowledgements:  
> This story has been a long time coming and it would never have seen the light of day without the enthusiastic and thoughtful beta-work of [aderyn](http://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn) and [mazaher](mazaher.livejournal.com)'s wonderful feedback.  
> Thank you both so much!
> 
>  
> 
> Warning:  
> I'm a white German woman who works as a psychologist writing about the experience of a woman of colour in the British police force. I'm sure there are mistakes I made and things I don't get and overlook. If I managed to do something offensive I would be honestly grateful if you could let me know. I promise I will apologise and try to correct my mistakes.

**2006**  
 _Sherlock fucking Holmes,_ she thinks, _damn his face_. She is shivering, still shivering even though the heat is cranked up as high as it will go. She pulls the blanket more tightly around herself, burrowing into the corner of her sofa, the fabric her mother crocheted soft around her shoulders. She tries to warm herself a little with the memory of the fury on Lestrade's face when her DS had realised what had happened, when he realised that that fucking piece of shit had – but no, better to think of the surprised little sound Sherlock had made when Lestrade had grabbed him by the lapels of his fancy bloody suit and slammed his back against a wall.

“I'm this close, Sherlock, THIS close to having you arrested!” Lestrade had hissed. But of course he hadn't. Birds of a feather and all that. What did her fear, what did Sherlock's callousness matter when compared to their clearance rate going through the roof? When compared to the smooth public school drawl of his voice?

 _He is just as taken in as everyone else is_ , she thinks with contempt. She thinks, too, that neither her boss nor any of the countless witnesses knows public school boys as she does, knows what they think they can get away with.

“You're a mixed-race woman in a white man's world and don't you forget it”, she mutters sarcastically to herself. 

 

_Remembers her mother, walking home from the tube, her head bowed down, not looking at anyone. Trying to teach Sally the art of looking harmless, of disappearing. Which should be funny, really, because her mother has never been a woman who is easily overlooked. Sally has seen her effortlessly command the attention of 30 bored teenagers, knows how the house brightened up, how her father couldn't take his eyes off her when she got in. Taking off her old raincoat, she would turn around and smile at all of them._

_“Sally, my girl, how was school?” And a hug and a kiss. Unmissable, warm, the center of their little domestic universe. And yet, when they stepped outside her mother seemed to shrink, seemed to become small and colourless. The brilliant dark brown of her skin somehow dulled, her hair, chemically straightened and impeccably styled, hidden under a hat. It was a metamorphosis she had barely noticed as a child but that had started to grate the older she became._

_Sally herself had launched herself at the world fist-first once she became a teenager. At some point, she had been fifteen, sixteen at most, she had decided that even joining a kick-boxing club simply wasn't enough. Instead, she had gathered a couple of her friends and started patrolling the neighbourhood. Picking fights, she now acknowledges ruefully, though at the time they had thought themselves the amazon princesses of Hillingdon._

_“Sally – ,” her mother had paused, looking her up and down as she stepped into the kitchen from the backdoor. “Good God, child, is that blood?”_

_Sally had just rolled her eyes, ineffectually swiping at the cut on her cheek that wouldn't stop welling up. “It's nothing, mum, don't make a fuss.”_

_“You – ,” her mother had looked up at the ceiling for a moment, clearly gathering her strength. “You want me to ignore the fact that my sixteen-year-old daughter just walked in from the streets looking like she went twenty rounds with a badger and bleeding from her face?”_

_“Mum, really, it's nothing.”_

_But her mother had just sighed, resignedly and grabbed her by the elbow to tow her into the bathroom. As she bent down to get out the first-aid-kit from under the sink where it used to lead a peaceful life after Sally stopped playing football, she sighed and said: “I know you are doing it for all the right reasons, Sally, but I'd really like you to stop getting into fights.”_

_Sally went stiff under her mother's ministrations, righteousness and offense making her voice flat. “They were beating him up, Mum. The Wallace boys, they had Marvin and they were beating him up and – ”_

_“As I said, Sally, I understand why you do it. As your mother I just really wish you didn't.” She let go of Sally's face, the cut cleaned to her satisfaction._

_“Come on,” she said, “I will make us a cuppa.”_

_But Sally wasn't quite ready to end the fight just yet. “You're letting them win, you know,” she said, her voice challenging, her chin jutting out in a gesture her mum used to call “all your dad”. “Every time we don't stand up, every time you pull that invisibility act of your, they win.”_

_“Hm,” her mum had said, not looking at Sally as she binned the used cotton wool. “What about that cuppa then?”_

_Years later, she had apologised but her mother had just shrugged. “I move through the world my way, you move through it yours. We can't all be kick-boxing amazons, now, can we?”_

 

She gets up now, makes herself a cup of tea and gets out the Jaffa Cakes. As she leans against her kitchen table, the chocolate and orange-flavoured jelly in her mouth melts and combines with the taste of the tea into memories of her dad. 

 

_Every Thursday he had picked her up from footy practice and made them a cuppa with a special treat, just the two of them. It's his disbelieving and ignorant comfort she wants right now, the scratchy wool of his jumper against her cheek as he presses her to his chest clumsily, drying her tears as she cries because Mildred had called her “nignog”._

_“I know, I know, pet,” he used to say on such occasions, rubbing her shoulders. “You just wait until I've had a word with her Dad!”_

_The “I know” had made her livid, later, because of course he didn't. But at ten all she had known, all she had cared about was that no-one insulted Rory Donovan's children or his wife if they didn't cherish a bloody nose. There has been a coldness at her left shoulder ever since he died._

 

Her hands have stopped shaking. 

She hadn't believed that, before, that your hands will actually start shaking like they do on the telly. But then, she had never been in shock before, not properly. Not until – but no, she will not think of that now. Instead, she puts her mug in the sink and then turns the hot water on in the shower until it almost scorches her when she gets in. 

Slowly the cold in her bones eases, one cell at a time. She still hurries, however, to break out the sweet-smelling shampoo, craving the sensory protection it provides against the hint of damp her bathroom smells of even in summer. 

 

_It had been damp and cold, so very, very cold down in that basement. With each minute that crept by, she had felt her muscles seize up into tighter knots until she didn't know anymore if her hands were numb because of the lack of circulation or because of the chill. She didn't shiver at first and she remembers being proud of that. She wouldn't give that bastard the satisfaction. He might sit at his dingy old table under the light of the one lightbulb talking about all the things he would do to her in time - but he would not see her shake._

_(She didn't know whether he was actually sitting at a table or under a lightbulb, the blindfold letting nothing through but a tiny sliver of light next to her nose. But she liked to imagine, liked to draw comfort from the trope of a hundred films. Trying to imagine herself as the heroine even though she knows fullwell that the numbers are all in favour of her ending up as the lamentable victim instead. But this is her story and it will not end like that.)_

Cassandra, _she had thought, as the cold crawled into her skin, crawled into her nose, her mind grasping for things to think of that were not here, that were not now._ I should have been called Cassandra. The princess of Troy cursed with being ignored when she predicted truth. What use is knowing the future if nobody believes you? What use is it to know that the city will be sacked, that Greeks bearing gifts (geniuses bearing deductions) are not to be trusted? What use is any of it, when you only end up, as women have done for all of history, bound and at the mercy of a man planning to claim his territory in the oldest way possible? Is this, _she wondered,_ how Cassandra felt as she sat bound in Mycenae? Her hands straining against the bonds behind her back, her mind seething with pictures of the future and the bitter truth under her tongue, waiting for Agamemnon and his knife?

I knew it, _she wanted to shout,_ I knew how this was going to end! 

_And she had known. Hadn't her gut fluttered and twisted as Sherlock spun out his plan for them, spun them all up in his web of probabilities and deductions and calculated risks?_

_Calculated risks!_

_Bile rose in her throat, would have made her retch had her captor not gagged her. It shook her, once, her body cramping up for a moment in the futile effort to get it out and then settling back down into petrified stillness. She thought that she has never hated anything as much in her life as she hates Sherlock Holmes. She hates his labcoat and his fancy suits, she hates the icy blue of his eyes and the way he's always so removed from everything human._

Would you've gone yourself? _She wondered bitterly._ Would you? If the killer had wanted milky white boys instead of grown women with ebony hair? Would your numbers have stayed the same, your calculations retained their temperature?

Some of us do not have the privilege to be marble, cold and unmarked no matter what gutter they roll around in. Some of us have to live in the real world all the time, collecting marks whenever unwanted fingers touch us.

_When Sherlock had first suggested his idea, Sally had felt an icy breeze tugging at the end of her carefully braided hair. There was a moment when the world tilted on its axis, making her dizzy and nauseous, her hands turning clammy, her whole body crying out, telling her to runrunrunhide. But police officers do not run. Detective Constables who have just been assigned to CID do, but there is only one thinkable direction: To the murderer, to the case, to danger._

_Lestrade had been kind about it, oh yes. Kind. Even trussed up and gagged, Sally's body gave a helpless twitch. She trusted (trusts?) Lestrade, trusted (trusts?) him more than anyone she has worked with at the Met, trusted (trusts?) him to lead her into battle, trusted (trusts?) him, still, to get her out of it, too. She tried not to think about the fact that now her body twitched away from the very notion of kindness, tried not to consider that it was his kindness that had led her here._

_Had he insisted or taken her participation for granted, she would have spit in his face. (Not literally, there is no place in the Met for women who spit on superior officers)._

_But he had been kind and concerned._

_Cold precision and logic on one side, warm gentleness and honest concern on the other. Between these two the voice at the back of her head had simply disappeared, it's screaming fading into a distressed murmur, into a shiver down her spine as she had asked: “You will be right behind me, yeah? Get me out of there before....”_

_“Of course,” Sherlock had said, turning back to the wall that held all the information they had collected. Their very own scrap-book on the man who the papers had imaginatively called the Tottenham Rapist. “We will get you out and home in time for tea, don't you worry.”_

_Lying bastard. And idiot her, taking what was clearly simply astute manipulation for sincerity._

_Cassandra, she thought, her name should have been Cassandra. The woman who spoke the truth and was not believed, not even by herself. Especially not by herself. She couldn't suppress the shivers that began to rack her body, her white blouse and the uniform trousers an inadequate protection against the chilly dampness of the basement (he had taken her police issue jacket off her, her shoes, her baton)._

_One of the shivers became a shudder that rattled the legs of the old wooden chair against the cement floor and suddenly Sally wasn't alone anymore in the darkness behind the blindfold. There was cold steel at the delicate skin just below her ear and the man's breath whispering against her shoulder as he murmured to her. “Getting cold, are we, darling? Don't worry, I'll warm you right up.” One of his hands snuck under her blouse, cold and hideous against her skin and for a moment Sally thought she would throw up after all, would choke on her own vomit with the gag still firmly in place._

_But then the hand receded and she remembered that he never did this, not until after 3 am. The dying hour, her aunt Lily had called it, the time when patients die and depressed people wake from their uneasy sleep_

_Sherlock had promised, Lestrade had been absolutely certain that they would get her out before that. But. But they had been right behind her. But three hours had passed without so much as a sign from them. But it was 1 am, now, and a part of her had never believed that they would come for her at all, once he had taken her. For a moment she curses the absolute awareness of passing time that has been her specialty since they had learned to read the clock in kindergarten. What she would give right now to be drifting in timelessness. But it has always been there, this internal clock, always, stubbornly forcing her into the here-and-now._

_She drifted, then, for what felt like aeons, drifted in the dark, a dark-skinned woman at a white man's mercy, another trope she tried not to think about. (Not a trope, the voice at the back of her head murmured again, not a trope but a hateful pattern ingrained so deeply it has been playing out for centuries). She drifted, a goddess descending into the underworld, waiting to find out if she will be Persephone or Eurydice. Years later she would return as fury incarnate, her hair aflame, her eyes blazing as she runs another rapist down in another city. But for now she drifted, sank._

_Her skin turned cold, her feet only vaguely to be sensed. Was she, she wondered, turning into marble after all? Black marble, untouched, unmarked, cold and distant? The blood in her veins seemed to flow sluggishly, and she couldn't feel her heart, couldn't feel it all._

_There were images behind her lids of goddesses and queens, of nymphs and mortal women turning into laurel trees, turning into stone, turning into salt. She saw herself, a girl of five, learning to read while trying to decipher the myths growing up towards her from Bulfinch's Mythology. How long ago was that? A lifetime? A second? A century or two?_

_She was unable to tell, unmoored as she was, time finally becoming flexible. She hadn't counted on how lost that would make her feel._

 

When she gets out of the shower, she wraps herself in the biggest, most scratchy towel that she owns (nobody in her family has ever understood her love for scratchy towels) and rubs her skin until it feels warm and aglow with life. 

She stands in front of the mirror for a while, her hair wrapped in a second towel, and looks at her body in the free patches of glass not obscured by the steam. She watches her breath making her chest rise and fall, presses a finger against her thigh to see the blood flow back when she releases the pressure. This is her body, soft and pulsating and alive, her face with her father's mouth and her mother's nose. She raises one arm, makes a fist, splays her fingers open again. She thinks of Sharika, 10 years old and her best friend, showing her the intricate finger movements she was learning in her Tamil dance class. She tries to move her own hands like that, fails, but delights in the clumsy, irregular movement. This is her body, still hers, alive and moving as it has always moved (she has never been a dancer), not a centimeter of it turned to marble, black or white, all firmly _here_ , all firmly _now_.

She wraps up in her robe and then stretches out on the couch again, muscles loose now and movements easy. She looks at the ceiling, the smooth white expanse of it becoming the screen on which her memories are projected. Because this is easier, far easier, to think about with her eyes open.

 

_“Why the hell,” she had grit out, teeth clenched tight against the shivering and emotion quaking through her, “why the everloving fuck did you take so fucking LONG?”_

_Lestrade, who had refused talking to her until after the paramedics had checked her out, winced. “I'm sorry, Sally, but something went wrong with the tracking chip.” The chip they had put on her was a warm bit of plastic against her cold foot, stone turned into breadcrumbs. “We had to wait for the lab to finish analysing what we scraped off Miriam Wilkins' shoes and – ”_

_Which was when Sherlock had walked up to them, long coat flaring around him like a skirt, to say: “Yes! The delay gave him enough time to contact the two men he was going to share the video with and with two additional hours even your trained monkey were able to track them down.” He smiled brilliantly, clearly as high on success as he usually got on illegals and Sally felt something in her gut turn to ice._

_Sherlock wheeled on Lestrade, jabbing a finger at his shoulder until Lestrade looked at him, his shoulder effectively cutting Sally off from the conversation. “I told you,” Sherlock crowed, “I told you he wasn't working alone, but would you listen?”_

_“Yeah,” Lestrade said, “look – ” and then his face froze for a second. “Sherlock, you didn't – ” he interrupted himself, bringing one hand up to pinch the bridge of his nose and then saying very, very quietly: “Sherlock, for the love of God, tell me you didn't disable that tracker.”_

_Sherlock snapped his mouth shut and looked over Lestrade's shoulder, his whole posture screaming defiance as the ice in Sally's belly turned to water, rising in her gullet, threatening to finally make her sick, no gag impeding the reflex._

_“I – ,” Sherlock started, but Lestrade interrupted him, his voice an angry hiss that made the hairs on Sally's neck stand up._

_“Did you or did you not disable the tracker we put on Constable Donovan?”_

_“We, ” Sherlock said and he had the nerve to sound annoyed, the bloody bastard, “needed the time because for some reason nobody in the Metropolitan Police Force can type faster than a kindergardener and –”_

_But Sally had heard enough. “You freak!” Her voice sounded high and unsteady even in her own ears but her anger was a hot certainty in her stomach._

_Sherlock flinched a little, his eyes briefly skittering to hers in an expression that was unreadable (because it couldn't possibly have been guilt, could it?) before returning to Lestrade._

_Sally was still trying to lever herself into a standing position from her perch in the back of the ambulance, fight punching flight in the jaw and propelling her forward in order to gouge his eyes out. But before she could take more than one step, Lestrade had already lunged forward, fisting his hands in Sherlock's coat as he shoved him against the rough concrete wall._

_“I'm this close, Sherlock, THIS close to having you arrested!” Lestrade hissed and something about the fury in his voice got to her, warmth slicing through ice. It was helped by the disbelieving surprise on Sherlock's face._

_She turned around and vomited, her stomach heaving, her whole body clenching to get away, away, get it out, get it out. She didn't bring up more than a cup of water but her stomach kept seizing and seizing, leaving her doubled over and gasping, her mind clinging to one clear thought:_ This is not why I joined. This is not why I fucking joined the fucking police, to play bait for a fucking psychopath.

 

Even now, the thought makes her curl up on herself and she becomes tight ball in the corner of her sofa. The look in his eyes had been horrifying, utterly horrifying. Cold, distant, dismissive. _How can anyone think like this? She asks herself. How can anyone calmly assess the risk of a colleague getting raped and murdered, compare it to the probability that they will catch two additional criminals and then rationally decide that leaving her in terror for two additional hours is the logical thing to do?_

A sob creeps out of her throat, unexpected, unwanted. This, this is worse than being tied up with a knife at her throat. At least her captor had tried to manipulate her feelings, had played on her emotions. He had treated her as a person in his own perverse way. But to realise that to Sherlock Holmes she was nothing more than a variable in his equation, that he had carelessly optimised her usability without any regard for what it would feel like to have trusted him and be abandoned – it's unbearable.

 _And the worst part,_ a small voice in her head says, _the worst part is that you knew he was capable of that. Didn't you dislike him from the start? Didn't you see right through him when you first met him? A spoiled rich brat is what he is, to whom the whole world is a giant amusement park. And you KNEW IT._

Her breath hitches again and her mouth contorts in self-loathing. If only.... If only she hadn't wanted to catch that sick bastard of a rapist so much. If only she hadn't been so set on proving herself, of disproving the nasty little smirk the DCI had given her as he mumbled something about affirmative action. If only she hadn't trusted Lestrade, hadn't believed in the Met so much, hadn't believed in what it stood for.

If only she hadn't trusted Sherlock fucking Holmes to treat her like a human being.

**Author's Note:**

> I've wanted to write this story ever since I watched the first episode of Sherlock for the first time. See, I liked Sally Donovan a lot in the first few glimpses we get of her at the press conference and I was really hoping that we would see quite a bit of her. And then I was both baffled and annoyed when she was shown leveling playground insults at Sherlock without any apparent provocation. I felt that I was meant to hate this woman and the unprofessional way she interacts with Sherlock but I wasn't given any kind of coherent character motivation for WHY she hates him. That sort of thing annoys me deeply. And then there was this scene during the drugs bust where she cautioned Lestrade that Sherlock will always let him down in the end. That sounded weirdly personally. 
> 
> My brain started rattling.
> 
> Assuming that Sally isn't just the Queen Bitch Trope personified but an actual person, what could have motivated her to act the way she does?
> 
> I mean, it's not actually hard to come up with a scenario in which Sherlock gives her legitimate motivation for her intense fear/hate response. The guy drugs his best friend and scares him half to death without any apparent moral qualms, after all. And Sally, as we can see in TRF, is someone who sets great store by the rules and procedures of police work, which are things Sherlock ignores and dismisses routinely. So, this is how this story started.
> 
> And then it grew a mind of its own and insisted it become a meditation on perceptions of reality.


End file.
